Don't worry, you're not alone. I started off completely broke as well. I had GBP 70 left before I hit my overdraft limit and the bank said they were absolutely not going to extend it!

Working at home is good, because you can minimise expenditures. You don't need to pay for commuting to work or any other public or private transport, you'll make and cook your own meals (much cheaper than buying sandwiches from the deli!) and instead of going out after work with colleagues, you'll just stay in, make another cup of coffee and press on with building your site. (Now that's entertainment!)

For the first three months I was building my site professionally I took on other work outsourced from other small companies which I could easily do at home - in my case this was transcription of audio interviews. The fact that I had a trickle of steady money coming in relieved the stress a little bit.

After three months I was pulling in enough from my site that I could afford to forgo the transcription work and used the new extra four hours a day to work on my site.

The first year was a bit touch and go. But I had something of a grand vision, so I carried on plugging away. By the time I got to the second month of my second year (Feb 2004) I was starting to make enough where I could go out for drinks with my friends again once or twice a week.

I would advise you to keep a balance on your site between CPM, CPC, CPA and sponsorship channels, to keep reviewing them and to never stop coming up with ideas, testing them and implementing them.

The reality is that most people are not creative enough to figure things out for themselves and will spend months if not years chasing the dream without a plan.

There are schools to teach you "how to" perform a task, but there is no school that can teach you to be creatrive.

Only you know your own skillset. If you have marketable skills then go sell them.

You have to sit down and turn off the PC. Get a pen and paper and list your skills. Look at them and then see what is or is not marketable.

If you find something then follow it. If you don't then staring at the screen isn't going to help you.

Get involved in your local community. Solve a problem locally then apply it to the web. Ideas come from experience, and experience opens the door for more ideas.

There is a great big world of problems that need to be solved. Throwing up another formula website, cutting and pasting links, copying other peoples work, is not a solution to anything.

If a person is too short they need a stool to reach high cabinets. At some point in time someone decided that a stool needed to be manufactured - they set out to do this and made it happen.

Later on someone fell off that stool and was injured. So another person made the stool more stable.

Another realized the stool was always in the way after use, so they made a stool that was foldable.

Another realized the stool was scratching the floor, so they made a stool that had scratch resistant feet.

Another realized it was too heavy to move around, so they made it lighter.

A stool is a very simple object. But there are a million ways to make it more useful.

When you can view the web in a way that creates improvements for existing sites/products/services or creates whole new ideas then you'll have something worth persuing.

So you have to look inside yourself and see what you can do - what are you good at, what do you like, what are your passions. Then you have to find a market that has a problem, then you have to deliver a solution to the program.

And yes there is money to be made delivering and existing solution to and existing problem. It's about matching the two together.

If you have an idea - write it down. Keep a list. Return to it later. Over time you end up with many many ideas.

I currently have more projects and ideas than I could ever hope to accomplish. So I choose the most interesting and then work on them.

Over time you realize that if this business really is for you - you won't run out of ideas. You'll run out of time.

You may write a cup of articles weekly about desing, dreamweaber, wordpress etc and distribute them in the 6-10 good directories around the web.
Use your anchor text keyword (niche) in your signature, linking to a specific page in your website optimized for that niche keyword.
With some time you'll see the results.

A while back I read an article by Willie Crawford where he said that putting together a product and then selling the Resell Rights or Private Label Rights to the product is quick way to bring in a quick $1000.

Since you are good at putting up sites you could find a bunch of these products at the free giveaways and then put up a site to resell them.

Or you could put together short reports (15 to 25 pages) on Wordpress, Site Building etc.. and sell them for $7 each.

Here's something to think about... Even if you're aiming to do some quick projects, such as creating short reports to sell cheaply, I strongly recommend that you plan some over-all strategy. For example, these $7 reports could be part of a master plan to build a large email list, or a large authority website, or a network of blogs, or an ebook publishing empire (or all these things), so that your business provides you with continuing revenue in the future.

Try not to fall into the trap of merely doing stuff which provides you with money right now but has no long-term revenue stream.

I haven't bought or read it, so I'm not particularly recommending it, but generally Willie gives good advice. However, to me, making that kind of money in 24 hours without a responsive mailing list sounds unlikely. It could well be saying that you'll make that kind of money within 24 hours of putting something like a report on sale. Not from now.

AllanGardyne wrote:Even if you're aiming to do some quick projects, such as creating short reports to sell cheaply, I strongly recommend that you plan some over-all strategy.

philwiley wrote:Willie Crawford is currently offering a report "How to make $1000-2000 in 24 hours" for $5...

I haven't seen this, but I bet you a fiver Willie has planned "some over-all strategy".

I've always found WC's stuff interesting. But as with all "gurus", it's often what they do themselves that yields the biggest lessons. The problem is, the most public examples are generally in the good old IM arena.

Don't get me wrong, I've bought Willie's stuff in the past without complaint. I'm just making a general point.